PDF-Fassung - Hochschul-Informations-System GmbH

Summary/Zusammenfassung XIII
Summary
Medical research centers provide medical scientists with the laboratory apparatus and veterinary
facilities they need for their research. Typically such centers are divided into pool areas, institute
areas, service areas and animal husbandry areas. In recent years, a number of medical faculties
and university hospitals have commissioned and built research buildings; others are under
construction or in the planning phase.
This report seeks to develop planning aids and requirement models for such medical research
centers. The report builds on the planning tools developed to assess the requirements of other
natural sciences. However the focus on research buildings as opposed to organisational units, as
in previous studies, has meant that several modifications have proven necessary.
Structural basis: In medical research centers biomedical and animal experiments are used to
investigate questions from all research fields. As well as medics, some of whom also work in
hospitals, researchers include biologists, biochemists, chemists and pharmacists. These can form
either more or less autonomous research groups, financed by third party funds, or be
organisationally linked to institutes of theoretical medicine.
Space requirements: The space requirements of biomedical research depend on the
experimental procedures and working processes of typical research groups. As the experimental
procedures used by groups working in different fields are largely similar, the space allocation plans
of medical research centers consist only of a few room types. These are very similar in all medical
research centers, although in some centres experimental laboratories and theoretical workplaces
are accommodated separately, whilst in others there are combined workplaces.
Laboratory animal husbandry: “Animal models” are frequently used in biomedical animal
research, particularly genetically modified mice which have been manipulated to make them
particularly vulnerable to the disease that the scientist wants to study. Surgical experiments are
also frequently carried out on pigs and sheep. In order to care for the laboratory animals and to
provide the necessary hygiene standards high-tech laboratory animal husbandries are required.
These are usually provided as a central facility and put at the disposal of the whole medical faculty
or university hospital.
Requirement planning: The modelling of quantitative and qualitative relations between space and
personnel structures is central to requirement planning. As the future occupants of a medical
research center are often not known at the time of planning, the modelling starts at the level of
structural resources; this marks a contrast to the planning process for other faculty buildings. Only
in the second stage is the possible future occupancy with research personnel analysed.
Requirement models for medical centers are put together from models of pool areas, institute
areas, service areas and animal husbandry areas, which describe the space allocation and
occupancy plans of the different functional areas. This study suggests three such centres which
can put together from these models and calculates requirement ratios and building costs on the
basis of these models.
Medizinische Forschungszentren HIS GmbH